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Scenes Unseen: The Summer of ’78

Long-forgotten pictures capture escape and discovery in the city’s parks.

Scenes Unseen: The Summer of ’78

Long-forgotten pictures capture escape and discovery in the city’s parks.

By JIM DWYER APRIL 27, 2018

Paul Hosefros

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Six months ago, a conservancy official cleaning out an office came across two cardboard boxes that had been sitting around for decades.

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Inside were 2,924 color slides, pictures made in parks across New York City’s five boroughs late in the summer of 1978. No one had looked at them for 40 years.

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Here are multitudes.

Neal Boenzi

Cricket players, kite flyers, fishermen, old people in floppy hats and young ones in hardly anything.

Paul Hosefros

A golfer wheeling his cart out of a majestic mist in Forest Park, Queens.

Neal Boenzi

Girls tip-toeing along a splintered boardwalk at Coney Island, Brooklyn.

Neal Boenzi

Until now, none of these images have ever been displayed or published. A selection of them are here and in a special print section. More will be on view from May 3 through June 14 at the Arsenal Gallery in Central Park, 830 Fifth Avenue, near 64th Street.

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These images were the work of eight staff photographers whose pictures normally ran in The New York Times, but who were idled for nearly three months in 1978 by a strike at the city’s newspapers.

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Not long after the strike began that August, a contingent of the photographers — Neal Boenzi, Joyce Dopkeen, D. Gorton, Eddie Hausner, Paul Hosefros, Bob Klein, Larry Morris, and Gary Settle — met with Gordon J. Davis, the city parks commissioner.

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They proposed to wander the city and make pictures of the parks and the people in them.

No one holds a smartphone.

Life, uncurated.

“I was skeptical,” Mr. Davis said, “but what they came back with made me cry.”

Joyce Dopkeen

New Yorkers drank beer and licked Popsicles and smoked weed.

D. Gorton

They sunned themselves…

Paul Hosefros

big grown adult people double-dutched…

Paul Hosefros

and little ones squatted on haunches to go eyeball to eyeball with pets.

D. Gorton

They painted landscapes.

Larry Morris

Roasted entire pigs over pits of coals.

Neal Boenzi

The city was a financial ruin and stuff was busted and it seemed it would be that way forever.

Gary Settle

People napped on rock slabs at beaches and tottered along piers so rickety-tilted that it was hard to see how everyone didn’t slide right into the water.

Paul Hosefros

No one is sure, any more, how long the photographers worked or how much they were paid. Probably not long and not much.

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Mr. Davis, then less than a year into his job as commissioner, remembered the emotional jolt of reviewing a few sample frames. “Then they all disappeared,” he said.

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The infamous wretched New York of the 1970s and 1980s can be glimpsed here, true to the pages of outlaw history.

Paul Hosefros

But that version has never been truth enough.

The photos speak a commanding, unwritten narrative of escape and discovery. “You see that people were not going to the parks just to get away from it all, but also to find other people,” said Jonathan Kuhn, the director of art and antiquities for the department.

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From the trove, Mr. Kuhn has selected 65 pictures to mount for the exhibit at the Arsenal Gallery, which is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

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Like the starlight that travels millions of years before we see it, the four little boys stand in their underpants at Coney Island on an August day in 1978, and it is only now, in a found photograph, that we behold them.

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The ocean has not quite left their hair. Four decades later, they are still flexing their muscles, still just about 10-going-on-11.

Paul Hosefros

Admission to the exhibit, like the parks and starlight, is free.The NYC Parks/New York Times Photo Project will be on view from May 3 – June 14, 2018.

Paul Hosefros

Restart

Jim Dwyer, a native New Yorker, has written the About New York column for The Times since 2007.